Phantom Corsair: Shadows Over Tomorrowland

When the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg combine collapsed in 1937, it wasn't because their cars were not attractive enough.  In fact, Hupmobile and Graham paid to use the Cord 812 series body dies in a last-ditch (but unprofitable) attempt to impart some glamor to their products.  It's been said that the rightness of the Cord 810 & 812 design* was proven by the fact that almost nobody ever tried to rebody or restyle one.  Nobody, that is, except Rust Heinz, scion of the ketchup empire with its 57 varieties.  In 1938, Heinz and Maurice Schwartz completed their rebody of Rust's personal Cord, which started out as this 1936 model 810 sedan …

In the photo, Rust and future wife Helen appear happy with Gordon Buehrig's masterpiece.  But it may be that they were mostly happy with each other.  Because following Rust's sketches, Pasadena coach builder Bohman & Schwartz formed something out of sheet steel and aluminum that didn't much resemble that Cord, or anything else outside of science fiction.  And whether or not you like the result, you'll probably admit it's pretty hard to ignore...

For one thing, it's enormous.  At 237 inches, it was 3.5 feet longer than the Cord Beverly sedan, and the 76.5" width was enough to seat four abreast in front (with one passenger to the driver's left) and two in the intimate (or claustrophobic) rear, between built-in cabinets and cabin walls cushioned with rubber and cork.  The cushioned cabin was part of a focus on safety which was mostly passive.

The cabin was fully instrumented, with an altimeter added to the usual gauges, and featured "door ajar" warning lights on the ceiling, as well as push button controls on the dash for the electrically-operated doors.  The car cost about $24,000 to build at a time when you could buy a new Ford for less than $1,000 and a just-discontinued Cord for $2,500.  Heinz planned to put the car into limited production (which might have used up some leftover Cord drivetrains) at $12,500 a copy, and advertised in Esquire, but found no takers…

                                           

Looking at the ad, it's perhaps helpful to remember that this was the era of science fiction comic books, and that the panic-inducing War of the Worlds radio broadcast also happened in 1938.  The Corsair was a product of its time, and while Heinz was unable to pre-sell any cars, he did succeed in getting the car displayed at the New York World's Fair in 1939, and a leading role for it in the Hollywood film The Young in Heart, where it appeared in multiple mirror images as the Flying Wombat.

The whole program came to a tragic halt in late July of 1939 when Rust Heinz, age 26, died as the result of a crash in which his Buick was broadsided by another car.  Ironically, in view of his interest in passive safety, Heinz was a passenger, and a friend was driving. The Heinz family held onto the Corsair well into the 1940s.  It might never have made a very successful production car owing to its size and weight, the expensive hand labor required to build it, and design flaws like the restricted outward view, and small cooling intakes which forced the use of two Lincoln radiators.  But in his sketches for the Phantom Corsair, Heinz reflected, perhaps unconsciously, something deeply unsettling about his era.  It's fairly easy to design a cute car or a comical one, but difficult, I think, to design an ominous one.  The dark, low, hovering form of this car manages to lurk wherever it appears…...and haunts us like the dream of the World's Fair which opened with hopes of technology lifting the prospects for all mankind, and was interrupted by a terrorist bombing  as well as the onset of World War II in Europe.  The Heinz family sold the Corsair in the 1940s, and it now resides in the National Automobile Museum (once known as the Harrah Collection) in Reno, Nevada.

*Footnote:  For more on the design of the Cord 810 & 812, see our first post, "A Review of the Monterey Auction Weekend", from August 25, 2015, and "Looking Back: When Indy Was Indie", from September 1, 2015.

Photo credits:
Top:  torontosun.com
2nd:  carstyling.ru
3rd:   wikimedia
4th (interior):  remarkablecars.com
5th:  carstyling.ru
6th:  vanderbiltcupraces.com
7th & 8th:  carstyling.ru